The “Stuck at Home With” series profiles players, caddies and staff in the women’s game who are making the most of an unprecedented break in tour life due to the coronavirus pandemic. New stories will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday.
Samantha Wagner had put a brand new set of clubs – Callaways – in her bag for this 2020 season. She had spent the last few months overhauling her swing with a new instructor on the other side of the country. After two years learning the ropes on the Symetra Tour, this figured to be a big year on her climb to the LPGA.
It’s what makes the waiting these past few weeks so much harder.
Like the rest of the professional golf world, Wagner is grounded at least until mid-June, which is the anticipated restart date for the Symetra Tour. It’s one thing for an established player to take a forced break in her career, but it’s something entirely different to be on the kind of launch path that Wagner felt herself on, only to have it come to an abrupt stop.
“It feels like the off-season,” said Wagner, an Orlando-based player slated to make a solo trip to California right before the coronavirus brought the country to a screeching halt.
It’s a steep learning curve going from college to professional golf. Wagner, 23, played two seasons at the University of Florida before making her pro debut at the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open. After two more professional starts, Wagner advanced all the way to final stage of Q-School that fall but came up short of any LPGA status.
In her first Symetra Tour season in 2018, Wagner made the cut in more than half of her 20 starts. She had back-to-back top 10s in June. It was important to learn how to mentally deal with knowing exactly how much money she needed to land an LPGA card (only the top 10 money earners do that).
“You’re thinking, ‘If I have three top-20 finishes or better, obviously I’m not sure what everyone else is going to do, but it’s going to be close,’” she said. “You’ve got it in your head and you’re playing with that. It’s hard to stop yourself from doing it.”
Wagner was inside a tightly packed top 30 with three tournaments left that season, but ultimately landed in 50th on the year-end money list. Life goes on.
The Wagner family is a tight-knit one. Milestones are shared. So after Wagner’s older brother C.J. proposed to his girlfriend Madison at the end of 2018, their Oct. 25 wedding date went down on the calendar with a big circle. The only problem was, as Wagner later confirmed, it was going to fall right on top of the LPGA Q-Series.
Family discussions ensued, and C.J. assured his sister he’d understand if she couldn’t be there. It became hard to focus on the golf.
“In my heart, I knew where I wanted to be,” she said. “All year, it was like, ‘If I don’t play well here, it’s just making my chances of being at his wedding worse.’”
Ultimately, Wagner missed the last eight cuts of the 2019 season, decided not to enter Q-School and doesn’t regret her decision for a second. The weekend marked two new beginnings: a new marriage for C.J., and a game overhaul for Samantha.
If there’s a silver lining in this shutdown, it’s that the extended break has given Wagner time to groove a brand-new swing, built with help from California-based instructor Chris Mayson. Her decision to change coaches “was my first adult thing,” Wagner says, considering Mayson is her first instructor who didn’t know her as a teenager.
He took one look at her swing – which involved an over-the-top, drop-it-inside move – and told her he wasn’t sure how she was making contact.
“I know I struggled mentally with all the stuff about the wedding last year, but my swing was really off as well,” she said.
Wagner made such monumental changes that she spent an initial six weeks on the range adjusting, “which I have not done ever in my life,” she said. She has tested it only once in competition, at an Eggland’s Best Tour event in Daytona Beach in January. She finished fourth.
As this break from competitive golf drags on, Wagner’s mom Amy has had much-needed words of wisdom.
“Pick something to work on,” she told the whole family.
For Samantha, that means blogging. She made her first post on a new blog site on March 29.
“It’s exciting,” Wagner said of her writing. “I feel like it’s something I’ve been going back and forth on wanting to do. I never knew where to start.”
She has a stack of books to read, too, and is considering taking a class to earn her real estate license. The family brought home a new Golden Retriever puppy, Yoddha, last month, too. Despite all the distractions, a feeling of suspense persists.
“The first two years, I had two things that were in my control with school and my brother’s wedding. And it’s not just me. I have friends all over the country and all over the world, some aren’t even playing.
“We’re all just waiting.”
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